“... than their unseeded quarter-final opponents, they were terrible. Henman called his match against Michael Stich ‘my worst experience on a tennis court’. He couldn’t get a first serve in. He stayed back on the second serve and couldn’t get that in either. He couldn’t return. He missed volleys (against Krajicek he volleyed like Edberg). Even his famed ...”

“... for Mr Laurence’s magnum opus. Shaw’s dislike of bibliolatry (vented in Caesar’s ‘Let it burn’ on hearing that the library of Alexandria was in flames) thwarted several potential bibliographers during his life, and their labours (which Mr Laurence describes as ‘unintentionally amusing’ and ‘eccentrically devised’) did not amount to very ...”

“... to write for themselves’. Ralph Bates notes the care and courtesy with which some Anarchists burn a church. ‘The street is brighter, purer, it seems to Compañero Sagasta and me, when the church is burnt down. Perhaps now we may argue reasonably with our women.’ Anthony Powell’s well-judged put-down of Hemingway’s plodding propaganda film Spanish ...”

“... On the north side, squatters’ cabins and planted shade trees. Further up is the dump. Burn pit, fish guts, trash. Recall the neighbours. You can’t just do whatever you want. There are certain kinds of boating. Gull Lake’s close. We all drive. A kind of self-governance evolves, a highly specific ecosystem, the beginnings of a kind of ...”

“... If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown ...”

“... other writers would dedicate a whole chapter.Nowhere is this better displayed than in his novella Michael Kohlhaas, first published in its entirety in 1810. It tells the story of a husband, father, horse dealer and ‘good citizen’ who, while attempting to cross into Saxony to sell his wares, gets ripped off and mocked by the Junker of the castle at the ...”

“... an early suffragist. She knew how to earn good money as a dressmaker and hen-keeper. Her husband Michael Cleary was an educated and literate cooper, whose services were much in demand by local businesses. He had served his apprenticeship in the progressive town of Clonmel and had good prospects. As a couple, they seemed the very image of a modernising ...”

“... hint of Blakean innocence; their less peaceful suggestion that even mirrored animals can snarl and burn. It is understandable that the creator of the fulsome Fevvers should not be drawn to the ‘wet and spineless’ heroines of the Seventies, ‘the zomboid creatures in Joan Didion’s novels, for example’. I have always found it curious that Didion, who in ...”

“... historical judgment: From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied façades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished ...”

“... for the Barbarians, to the desire for ultimate anonymity and inscrutability in Life & Times of Michael K, or Mrs Curran’s abject retraction of her past in Age of Iron, or the haughty refusal to confess to the politically correct commission of inquiry into sexual harassment in Disgrace: ‘What goes on in my mind is my business, not yours.’ Coetzee has ...”

“... But there is, apparently, more competition for the honour than up the road at Bertorelli’s. Michael Foot passes by and nods, albeit ‘briefly’. Marcia Williams sweeps in: expect no nods from her. She comes under the novelist’s scalpel: ‘She’s an attractive woman, her face has a good bone structure, but there’s something curiously unreal about ...”

“... in the form of an objective, linear chronicle, cannot turn these omissions to narrative advantage. Michael Davenport in Young Hearts Crying has been a successful amateur boxer and a waist-gunner in B-17s during the bombing of Germany. Later on he writes what is said to be one of the finest contemporary American poems, ‘Coming Clean’, and later still he ...”

“... by order of the court, resulting in the destruction of the main prosecution witness against Michael Hickey, the youngest of the accused, though not his aquittal. At the original trial, these files were inaccessible to the defence. It’s only when the Home Office is stirred into action, as it finally was in the Guildford case following publication of ...”

“... images stay the same: St George has spiny armour like a dragon’s in order to face the beast, St Michael ditto in his victory over Satan. But art is ceremony only up to a point. Artists can be imprisoned by the art world’s expectations, condemned to repeat the story that brought them to its attention. Their work may have the comforting assurance of ...”

“... Man and Kapo – in the 1970s, and all three are now available in English (superbly translated by Michael Henry Heim, Bernard Johnson and Richard Williams). In their determination that the very worst be said, they are grim but not depressing – exhilarating, even. Each novel is quite different in structure and tone; what they share is a radical narrative ...”